The present invention relates generally to computer software, and more particularly, to user access to tabular data stored on small screen communication devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.
Mobile communication devices have made significant development recently. Another trend that has been observed is the convergence of traditional PDAs such as personal organizers with the mobile phones. More features have been added to the mobile phones, and more data can be accessed from the mobile phones as well. However, there is still a considerable limitation for the memory space on the mobile device so that many complicated applications operable on a regular computer may not operate on the mobile device.
In computer applications, many applications use tabular data wherein information is arranged in columns and rows. Each entry of a table is thus identified by a column and row. Unfortunately, the tabular format of data is not supported by many mobile devices. One of the reasons is that the small-screen mobile devices use “Java 2 Micro Edition” or J2ME as a run time operating software.
One approach is to provide a table library for any particular application on the mobile device. This approach may sound feasible, but actually impractical since the table library takes too much memory space of the mobile device. For example, a regular mobile phone has any where between 50K to 1 M bytes of memory space, and a typical table library may occupy 20K bytes.
What is needed is an efficient method for displaying tabular data on a small display of a mobile device without using a tabular library to be stored in the device.